Did I Really Like This? America Online

Internet access is a funny thing when you think about it. It’s still not that great in the US and dumb expensive. Plus it doesn’t feel all that special when smart toasters and lawnmowers can log on with ease.

However, at one time, online access stood as a cutting-edge phenomenon for everyday folks. Pundits of the day branded the “world wide web” as a “great equalizer” for, well, everything and users didn’t just hop online. They went “cyber-surfing” and people saw excitement at the world getting smaller via PCs.

Plenty of ISPs fought for your dollars but America Online had the US’s phone lines on lock in the late ’90s. My folks opted to sign up for the service after my siblings and I begged them to wise up. Then we installed AOL 3.0 via floppy disk sometime in ’98 and, with that, punched our ticket into the web.

Having AOL initially made me feel like the fanciest Negro on the block. Hearing the dial-up modem drop a hot 16 during the connection process sounds so awful today but it got me amped for some cookin’ on the internets. Granted, my older sisters hogged the computer and my parents monitored my browsing. Yet any online time became great online time as an 11-12 year old. NBA.com, Nintendo’s official site, Yahoo Games and AOL’s crummy keyword pages stayed in rotation.

Oh, and AIM became so crucial as more friends and girls I sweated got online in the next year and a half.

AOL started to act like a b*tch on the regular soon afterwards. The application was a resource hog, froze the computer all the time and forced hard restarts. Then we couldn’t log on for days for no reason. A separate phone line didn’t fully alleviate the problems. Junk mail rained down on us from Lawd knows where and random disconnects plagued it as well. You’d be chilling, looking at whatever, get that “Goodbye” out the blue and end up like this.

AOL got “prettier” with every update but it didn’t matter if we got on 9.0 or 4.0. The service sucked and the gimmicky improvements with each release didn’t make up for the massive problems which persisted throughout AOL’s run.

AOL looked even worse when I went to a friend’s house in ’99 and used broadband for the first time. Pages loaded in seconds and he could download songs off Napster in an instant. Heading back home to garbage ass AOL felt like browsing in molasses after that. It took a few minutes to get a basic page to load up; you might as well quit if it was Macromedia Shockwave or Flash enabled.*

Also, online video? Forget it. Daring to test RealPlayer resulted in “Buffering 15%…Buffering 45%…Buffering 95%…..Buffering 8%” until the CPU locked up. Then again that’s more of a knock on 56k’s limitations than it is on AOL…but screw it, AOL was terrible at that too.

I’m grateful for getting my first hit at the internet via America Online. Conversely, I’m glad I haven’t used it, or dial-up internet, in over a decade and don’t miss it at all. It’s unfortunate how so many people lost their jobs as the company downsized in the past 10+ years. Then again the feeling of schadenfreude when the brand fell all the way off can’t be denied.

Thank Big Baby Jesus for broadband spreading out and becoming more affordable in AOL’s demise. Now what can we do about dropping a grip each month over a 15 Mbps connection, though?

Dawg I laughed so hard reading this article. I remember, being on the computer and connection being interrupted because my father would pick up the phone like “GET OFF THE INTERNET!!” and seeing the shit buffer for 10 minutes to hear a 3 minute song? Maaayne my teenage years LOL!

Never forget the connection that would go in and out if you were talking to friends or where in the middle of looking at a video…also getting called out for having a laggy connection if you where trying to do two things at once and got cut off again.

First song I ever downloaded? Took about an hour and a half for that PapaRoach ‘Last Resort’ to download. Lol i was extremely jealous of the chatrooms, my cuzin would always tell me about the chatrooms…

My dude I gave a broad my email which is still AOL and whatever swag I had working for me instantly went away. The look of disgust on her face like ” I was actually considering giving him some smh” next day hello gmail lol

dawg me and my roommate almost went to blows back in the day over this. I no phone jack in my room so when I wanted the internet I had a 75′ phone cord, I would save my limewire dls for overnight, 1 album used to take me a day or so. I would get heated when i would wake up and the line was disconnected. I was trying to replace some 200 cds I let him borrow for a vegas trip. that never made it back.

AOL was the shit, when a brotha had to pay for his own isp, went straight to the netzero…that shit would take forever.

I probably still have a disk around here on GP. I dLd the first lord of the rings with that on limewire…. took like 2 weeks, shit looked like garbage but my broke ass still watched on a 13 in tv like it was HD.

In middle school, I would tell everyone to make a list of songs they wanted on a CD. I would stay up all night on Kazaa/Limewire and sell em for $10 a pop. Many nights were ruined by a telemarketer call at the middle of the night, distrupting the dial-up. Ahh memories.

I remember trying to download shit off Kazaa/Napster and that shit would take years. I vividly remember downloading D12-Purple Pills before Napster shut down. I’m not sure wtf internet I had, but I was messing with that 56K of course with only a few 100MB of RAM.

All my AIM heads…do you guys still remember going to chatrooms and typing “ASL?”

I will never forget when my friend’s dad was on the internet doing something for his job and we hopped on the phone and started prank calling people. He hopped on the phone as soon as his son started cussin and flipped. Almost scared my homie to death.

In the height of the aol/aim days; we’d use to post in the chat rooms where people would drop new music when Shit leaked, turned out a lot of those kids were “hacking” stealing people’s screen names, etc. We were like 12..it was hilarious though…

Some kid ended up stealing the aim id for the dudes who were running Death Row Record’s website in ’99 or so, shit was hillarious.

I changed a couple digits, on my mom’s check number sho I could use the discs. Somehow she ended up paying for that, but she kept it. Only one phone line so I had to use it in the wee hours of the night(you know I stayed up for bet uncut) Destroyed my pc with winmx. Got del late as fuck (2006) and my life ain’t been the same since.

I remember Vince Carter’s favourite song being OutKast’s “So Fresh So Clean”. Of all the OutKast songs out there, that’s your favourite? Shallow bastard… I should also mention I grew up in Toronto lol.

I guess I’m out of date for still using RealPlayer to this day huh? Only reason I use it is to test run new music before dropping it in my iTunes. That iTunes play count has me paranoid I swear, I keep looking at it before the song title.

as sad as this sounds the first time a hood aggin like me had in home internet was when i first bought a sega dreamcast. it had the cord on the back for the phone to plug into, i called a local place and asked about it they said it would be 9.99 a month to run internet to it…i had enough net exposure messing around at school with it i thought i was gonna be doing all types of shit but the problem was it had no memory lol i didnt even know what that meant back in the day but what it DID let me do was send receive emails…listen to some music clips and for the first time ever i had PORN ON TAP. it wasnt nothing dope but there was some good pron image boards out there back in those days…no more beating off to xxl eye candy and victoria secrets catalogs for me.

Chat rooms is literally how I learned to type really fast. Slow typing niggas get no pussy.

A/S/L ????
Which is weird now that I think about it, u start off flirting by asking are you a female or male? and if they are a minor or not smh. I got so much strange off those chatrooms tho. Thanks aol

Haven’t touched AOL since I tasted the sweet freedom of college and broadband and never wanted to go back, but I can’t front: I still have an AIM client on my computer and phone. Far from the days of my buddy list having 300+ people on it though (I think I have 16 at last check)

I grew up in the boonies so my parents can’t even get broadband still, so its either dial up or bum ass Hughes Net for like $100 a month, so they’re still on that dial up tip. When i moved back home after college for a couple months I thought it was gonna be the death of me….Jerkin it to slideshows is the saddest thing you can do

ahhhh those were the days when I was og trolling in those aol chat rooms and also picking up girls who gave me their phone number as a teen.which was odd cuz you would think I would have got catfished a lot more since hardly anybody had pics cuz most did not have cams and camera phones was not even put out yet. damn nowadays I realize I either lucked out or common sense went a long way